Query about VLC playback

This is a query about the VLC Media Player on a Windows 7 system. If it's inappropriate for the Windows Secrets Lounge, I apologise and hope someone can point me to a more appropriate site.

In the Windows Secrets Newsletter - Paid Version - Sent: Thu 22/08/2013, Michael Lasky wrote an article titled "Favorite reader utilities for security and play" in which he described the VideoLAN product VLC in a subsection called "Infinite media-streaming capabilities". At one point he wrote " ... In my experience, VLC has never met an audio or video file format it couldn't play. ... ".

Well, I've met one and I wondered if anyone can help me sort it out so that VLC *can* play it.

I have some old VHS tapes of TV programs I recorded in the late '80's and early '90's and I'm trying to conserve them by putting them onto DVD. I'm using my VCR (misnomer - it doesn't record to tape) / DVD player/recorder "combi" unit to copy the tapes to DVD. The device is officially called an "LG Digital & Analog DVD Recorder / VCR Player Combi RC689D" and has a "dubbing" function specifically designed to make it easy to copy the contents of a VHS tape to a DVD (not Blu-Ray).

I put the particular tape in the machine together with a new, just out of the wrapper Kodak DVD-RW disc, and went through the process of copying the tape. When it finished, just to check, I removed the tape, took the DVD out then put it back in and tried watching it. It played and the quality of the recording was easily as good as the original tape, no mean feat as the tape was 28 years old!

Anyway, I then took the disc to my computer and attempted to play it with VLC only to find that neither Windows Explorer nor VLC can "see" anything on the disc.

o Explorer reports that the disc is totally empty.

o VLC, when attempting to treat the disc as a DVD, returns:

"Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'dvdsimple:///D:/'. Check the log for details."

o and when treating it as a "SVCD/VCD", returns:

"Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'vcd:///D:/'. Check the log for details."

I haven't been able to check the log, because I don't know where VLC puts it.

So I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about the format and/or the codec the LG machine uses to record on DVD and whether there's some way I can make the DVD "playable" on my (or any) computer?

Two things, read up on the LG manual for that box and see what the procedure is for finalizing the disc. After finalization it should be readable by other devices. If it still is not then it is possible the disc or burn quality is such that it is readable by one device (that it was produced on) and not on another. The latter is not common if the playback device is modern and has a sufficiently strong laser to read the darker layer of a home burned disc.

The Following User Says Thank You to F.U.N. downtown For This Useful Post:

You used an RW disk. Many players will not see an RW disk and your problem shows that this may be the case. Use a player capable of seeing an RW or use a DVD-R disk. There may be other solutions but this just popped out at me.

The Following User Says Thank You to philomel For This Useful Post:

I'm sorry there's been such a delay in replying to everyone, but thanks to all for your help. It *was* a problem with Finalizing. I thought that the LG machine automatically did that at the end of "Dubbing" from tape, but it didn't. What confused me was that the disc seemed to play OK on the combo unit but not anywhere else. But when I went *now* to check if the disc was finalized, it turned out that the recording on the disc had somehow been lost altogether and the disc needed to be re-initialised and the whole dubbing process repeated. But *this time* I went through the process of actually finalizing the disc and it all works beautifully!!! So thanks again to everyone for your help! Also, to philomel, I *did* (this time) check that a DVD-RW disc was OK, and thankfully both the LG and my VLC media player on the desktop can handle them. If I do the job properly, that is.